Agency Forward

Chris DuBois 0:00
What if I told you that the very things holding you back could actually be the key to unlocking your agency's next level of success? You see, most agencies view constraints as limitations, but strategic constraints can drive efficiency, creativity and sustainable growth. So on, today's episode, we are going to dive into the three types of constraints and how you can leverage those within your agency to achieve amazing growth. No one was asking for another community, but I've made one anyways. So what's different? The dynamic agency community is designed around access, rather than content, access to peers who've done it before, access to experts who've designed solutions, access to resources that have been battle tested and right now, the price for founding members is only $97 a year. Join today, so your agency has immediate access to everything you need to grow, you can join a dynamic agency dot community, and now let's dive into the three types of constraints. It's easier than ever to start an agency, but it's only getting harder to stand out and keep it alive. Join me as we explore the strategies agencies are using today to secure a better tomorrow. This is agency forward. All right, so I wanted to spend one episode diving into the three types of constraints that I feel every agency owner needs to be aware of. These are categories for constraints we're not thinking about like specific individual items that are holding you back, but rather just these, these general buckets that you could put each constraint, because you'll realize that sometimes enabling some constraints, putting some in play, could actually help you way more than if you're just looking at removing everything. Okay, so those the three types of constraints, first, governing, enabling and limiting. And, yeah, let's just dive in, right? So constraint number one, the governing constraints, Hey, these are non negotiable kind of like external rules that are that shape how agencies operate. You can think about them like lines on a road, right? If everyone follows the lines that are painted on that road, they follow the traffic patterns, they will end up getting to their destination faster. There's fewer accidents, right? If everyone follows the speed limit, everyone uses their turn signals, right? Then we if we can follow all of those rules, then we can get where we're going safer, faster, and everybody wins. Okay, that's a governing constraint, or an example of a governing constraint, where we have basically applied something to the situation to stop us from just going free. If no one was following the lines, and people were just driving wherever they wanted, there would be way more accidents, right? People would be speeding all over the place. There'd be way more injuries. And so, so by adding one of these, like these governing constraints, we're actually able to get like, the results faster, cool, all right? So some examples for how these are used in marketing agencies, regulatory compliance is a big one, making sure that you're doing all the right things and staying within these limits so that you can actually get to where you're going right GDPR, the can spam, like all of these different like, little things, but those also happen within your specific industries. So, like, you have to work within certain limitations. If you're if you're in finance, you can't, there's certain things you can and can't say. If you're working with legal companies like you can't do certain things. And so by staying within those, it means you're not going to have as many problems later. There's also platform limitations, and these are like external, like imposed rules, right? That we have to work within if, if Google, for their algorithm right, says you have to do X, Y and Z, otherwise, we're going to penalize you. Then as long as everybody's following those rules, you're going to do advance. When someone adds in one of these, like black hat tactics, it usually has like a ripple effect across the entire space, because they, you know, they kind of broke stuff in the process. They they found some tactic that they could exploit, and then when the the system has to, like, rebalance afterwards. And so, so those are a couple. The key takeaway is that, instead of resisting these governing constraints, right, actually figuring out how you can adapt and then optimize within them. Because they are there to help you. They're really they, they help you. Add this like clarity of focus to what you're doing to where, right, like if you, if you have to look at everything within. Your purview at any given time, there are so many variables that you're gonna have to pay attention to that you're not gonna actually be able to get the best result for what you're focused on. And so being able to to then focus and saying, Well, we don't have to worry about all of these things, right? Okay? Number two, enabling constraints. So these are now self imposed rules to try enhancing that focus again, right? It's another, another piece of this, another couple things that we're trying to do with this is increase our creativity, or even our speed at which we can get things done. One of my favorite examples comes from actually my high school English class, where we got told to write a short story without using the letter E. That simple little action, right? Of just removing the letter E from any words and stuff like it really shapes how you're thinking about even writing words that might have been common and like that you would just plug in because you're without thinking right? You now have to remove those. And so you're it causes you to take a completely different approach to what you're trying to do. That's what we're looking at with these enabling constraints. And so we're talking about things like, like adding budget caps, right? Limiting ad spend so that we have to force smarter targeting strategies. We could shorten some deadlines. I would be hesitant on this one, like, don't shorten them just for the sake of shortening. But if there's a very deliberate reason to shorten that deadline so that it gets people actually trying to work on things, maybe you're trying to remove some overthinking from the process, right? Then you could add, add those deadlines in productizing your services. It's another super easy one, being able to say, hey, we only do X, Y and Z, so, like, we don't even have to look at all of those other things. Maybe it's even just focusing your who you work with, right? We only work with this type of company who has this problem set. When you can do that right? You now have, you have added a constraint to the business, but it actually helps you focus and keeps you creative and helps you move faster, because you're you're working on a very specific subset of everything you could be working on. Okay, this is like enabling constraints are one of those levers that you can pull depending on what you whether you need innovation or efficiency. And so I would look at including those next number three, limiting constraints. These are going to be the bottlenecks to growth. These are what you normally think of when you're thinking about constraints. So they are the roadblocks that are going to stifle your progress, and you have to remove them if you want to continue growing. So there are a couple types you have, like, I guess dependency bottlenecks, where it's like a key team member has become a single point of failure. Oftentimes, this is the actual founder who's become that that single point of failure. Because you're doing everything yourself, it's hard to delegate. You got to trust people. All those things there could be scaling challenges where your, like, your Service Delivery breaks down at some point, for example, right? And so, or like, you have so much demand that you're actually not able to keep up. And so you need to figure out, well, how can I change my service offering in order to to facilitate this? Or maybe we increase rates right? Charge more, so that we have fewer people fighting to get in. And now it's easier to manage. Like, so much ways you can solve it, but the idea is that you have a challenge that has now become the bottleneck. There could also be even, like clients have their own bottlenecks, right? Like within your sales process, within anything like when you have to wait on them for certain aspects, it's like, how can we remove some of those constraints so that we don't have to worry about this? If you can, really like the game of business is, is just continuously identifying and then eliminating all of those constraints. And so when you can keep doing that, should be good to go. All right, let's talk about applying some of these within your your business. We got a the first thing you should do, raise identify your current constraints. So step one, let's just run like a constraint audit and break everything down into those three categories you're governing, like, what fixed external factors must we work within enabling what like intentional limits can drive better results, and then you're limiting for what bottlenecks are selling your growth. And once you have those, I would then go to step two, which is like flipping the narrative on constraints. So for governing constraints, I would ask, how can we use this to our advantage, right? So, if a PPC agency is pivoting to organic content after a major ad policy shift like maybe that is what they need to do in order to win. There was another service offering that they had, and they say, You know what, if we just change this to our core offering, we should be good to go.

Um. For enabling. Want to say, how can we strategically apply constraints, right? So maybe setting a max project scope that protects your margins and prevents scope creep, right to get everyone really focused on what's happening there, then limiting beliefs, or, sorry, limiting constraints. What's the fastest way to break through this, just asking that question, like, if this was easy, what would it look like, automating repetitive tasks, right? That might be enough to reduce some of these bottlenecks. Then we go into step three, which is to use the constraints to strengthen our positioning. The, I would say, category defining agencies are leveraging all of these constraints in different ways. With with niching down right saying no to certain services to build the premium brand, with scaling their productized offerings, they're structuring work into repeatable, high margin packages, and then they're they're installing, like creative innovation where they they have limited resources, and they're forcing so it forces better problem solving for them to do okay. Challenge for listeners, go through audit your agency's constraints, decide which to accept leverage or remove. Follow those, those three steps that I just outlined, identify the constraints right, governing, enabling, limiting, and flip that narrative. Ask the right questions so that you can actually view some of these are super positive for your business, and so just writing them off because you feel constraints are bad is not actually going to help you and then use the constraints to strengthen your positioning different things. If you can use, if you can do these things right, and you actually get really good at understanding constraints within your business, you will find way more opportunities like available for you. And so I would strongly encourage everybody to take a look at these. You that's the show everyone. You can leave a rating and review, or you can do something that benefits. You click the link in the show notes to subscribe to agency forward on sub stack, you'll get weekly content resources and links from around the internet to help you drive your agency forward. You.

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